i downloaded a skin and the fonts, how do i get the mplayer gui to work?

If you compiled support for it.. simply type.. gmplayer instead of just mplayer.

Don't forget to call a skin directory 'default' as mplayer seems to want something called default. More information about what you'd done and what problems you were having would help, though. For instance, you don't say whether you've untarred them. Are you having trouble with the 'tar' command? Have you installed them but didn't make a 'default'? Did you make a default and it's still not working? Does mplayer even work at all, from the command line? Or do you just not know the 'gmplayer' command, as trickykid says? And so on. Kind of shooting in the dark here.

actually i have no idea how to untar .bz2's, other than that all ive done is download the files lol

Ah. 'tar xjf filename' will untar it. So you need to have or make a ~/.mplayer/Skin directory. 'cd' to there and untar it or untar at the directory it's in and copy it there - whichever you prefer. Make sure you end up with ~/.mplayer/Skin/default with a bunch of .png files and whatnot in there. Then, assuming everything's okay with mplayer itself, type 'gmplayer' into an xterm - you'll see a lot of complaining but that's just what it does - it should load up, though. And, like I say, there's lots of documentation to read, including 'man tar' to learn all about that.

how do i make a directory....giant newb sorry

Um. Well, there are lots of ways, using various file manager but the most direct is to type 'mkdir directory-name' on the command line. First, check to see if you have an ~/.mplayer directory. Your prompt may tell you what your working directory is but, if not, do 'pwd' to print your working directory. If you're in your home directory, do 'ls -A' to list all files. See if .mplayer is there. If not, the easiest thing to do is run it from the command line. I think it creates that directory for you. Then see if it has a Skin directory by 'ls .mplayer' - if you don't see the Skin directory do 'mkdir .mplayer/Skin'. Then untar what you downloaded. Do 'mv directory-name ~/.mplayer/Skin/default'. That should do it.

-- Wait a minute - 101 posts since September? That's not entirely 'new'.

what am i doing wrong?

[terry@pppa32-city-1r7114 Skin]$ tar xjf Blue-1.0.tar
tar (child): Blue-1.0.tar: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
[terry@pppa32-city-1r7114 Skin]$

heh, yea most of the posts have been for crap like this, i mean its not really the same things each time, so im learning

The full name of the file is Blue-1.0.tar.bz2, isn't it? And if you're currently in... hm. I don't understand your prompt. If the tarball isn't in your current directory, you'll need to give the full path to it, as well as the full filename.

ok i untared the following files:

[terry@pppa32-city-1r7114 terry]$ tar xjf Blue-1.0.tar.bz2
[terry@pppa32-city-1r7114 terry]$ tar xjf extralite.tar.bz2
[terry@pppa32-city-1r7114 terry]$ tar xjf font-arial-iso-8859-1.tar.bz2


now do i move them to the skins directory, and how?

Oops. Whoah. I thought you were further along, for some reason. Are you compiling from source? Extralite stuff is the codecs that go in /usr/local/lib/codecs and so on. Maybe back up to the beginning. I though mplayer was already on your system and you were just wanting the graphical interface.

Incidentally, maybe look into these for the 'mkdir' stuff. The second, especially, is kind of old, but the basic's still apply.

http://linuxcommand.org/learning_the_shell.php
http://tldp.org/LDP/gs/node5.html

yea thats all i want...i mean i go into term. and type mplayer, it runs but i want the gui

Well, you may have the extralite stuff already then. If not... it's been awhile since I compiled it so I could be wrong but I think you just untar it to /usr/local/lib/codecs. That may vary from system to system though. Try ' locate dspr.so.6.0' (just a random file from the tarball) to see if it's already on your system. If not, untar that there. Then, with the skin, like I say, put that in ~/.mplayer/Skin/default with no further subdirectories. And with the fonts, do it just like the skin, but put it in ~/.mplayer/font. (You might even have the fonts as well.) You're using Red Hat - are you sure it doesn't have mplayer already set up to run as a GUI? Anyway - put those three things those three places, if you don't already have them and that should do it.

-- Yeah, you say you type 'mplayer' and it runs. To get the gui type 'gmplayer.